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In the summer of 1759, during the Seven Years' War, General James Wolfe arrived outside Quebec with about 7,000 regulars and a large fleet, with a young James Cook helping navigate the St. Lawrence. The Marquis de Montcalm held the Beauport shore with roughly 12,000 French regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous allies, and needed only to hold. Wolfe's July assault on Beauport cost him about 450 men to Montcalm's 60. Through August Wolfe was bedridden with fever and took opiates for the pain, Montcalm slept in his boots with his horse saddled, and the coming freeze of the river meant the Royal Navy would soon have to leave.

Wolfe rejected his brigadiers' plan and chose L'Anse au Foulon, a cove below a 53 meter wooded cliff. On the night of September 12 his boats drifted off course, a French speaking Scottish officer bluffed the sentries by claiming to be a supply convoy, and Colonel William Howe led 24 volunteers up the slope. By morning on September 13 more than 4,000 British troops stood on the Plains of Abraham. Montcalm attacked at once instead of waiting for Bougainville's 3,000 men, and the battle was over in under an hour. Both commanders were mortally wounded.

• Montcalm had dismissed warnings about the cliff path, saying the enemy would need wings to climb it.
• The officer Vergor had only about 40 of his 100 men at the top because he had let the rest go home for the harvest.
• Wolfe's men loaded two balls per musket and held fire until the French were about 30 yards away.
• Shot in the wrist, stomach and chest, Wolfe died after hearing the French were running, and Montcalm said he was glad he would not see the English in Quebec.
• A planned 250th anniversary reenactment in 2009 was cancelled after separatist leaders called it an insult and threats followed.

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A war elephant's driver, the mahout, carried a chisel and hammer so he could kill his own animal if it panicked and turned on friendly troops. By the later Vedic period in India, around the 6th century BC, elephant warfare was a formal science, and the Mahabharata sets rules under which elephant riders should fight only other elephant riders. The Nanda Empire was credited with 3,000 to 6,000 war elephants and Chandragupta Maurya with 9,000, figures many historians think were inflated to frighten invaders. At the Hydaspes, King Porus fielded 85 to 100 elephants that lifted and trampled Macedonian soldiers, and rumors of thousands more to the east helped turn Alexander's army back.

Alexander kept Porus's elephants, and his successors raced to acquire them. The Seleucids traded eastern territory to the Mauryans for 500 elephants that proved decisive at Ipsus, Pyrrhus shipped 20 to Italy, where Romans called them Lucanian oxen, and Hannibal crossed the Alps, though nearly all his elephants died. Scipio beat them at Zama by opening lanes in his maniples. Armies used males aged 25 to 40, with 60 year old veterans prized, and dressed them in cork lined scale armor and tusk swords. Field cannon ended their front line role, though Siam still fielded elephants with swivel guns in the 1890s.

• Hannibal's survivor in Italy may have been a single large elephant named Surus.
• At Thapsus in 46 BC, Julius Caesar armed his Fifth Legion with axes to hack at elephants' legs.
• Defenders of Megara reportedly drove pitch soaked, burning pigs at the enemy's elephants and caused a stampede.
• In 1398 Timur sent camels loaded with burning straw against the Delhi Sultanate's elephants, which turned and trampled their own army.
• In World War II, William Slim's 14th Army in Burma used elephants to build bridges and haul vehicles out of the monsoon mud.

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Rodrigo Díaz was born around 1043 in Vivar, north of Burgos in Castile, the son of a minor noble. He rose with King Sancho II and in 1063 fought at Graus alongside the Muslim emir of Zaragoza against the Christian king of Aragon. Sancho made him armiger regis, the royal standard bearer, who ran marching order, supply and camps, and his victories earned him the name Campeador, master of the battlefield. When Sancho was killed besieging Zamora in 1072, the throne passed to his brother Alfonso VI, and Rodrigo lost his post to his rival García Ordóñez. The famous scene at Santa Gadea, where he forces Alfonso to swear his innocence, appears in no 12th century chronicle.

Exiled in 1081 after an unauthorized raid into Toledo, a vassal of Alfonso, Rodrigo was turned away by Barcelona and hired himself to Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud of Zaragoza. His mixed army of Castilians, Muladis, Berbers and Arabs called him al-sayyid, the lord, which became El Cid. After the Almoravids crushed Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086, Rodrigo accepted the king's pardon but pursued his own aim, defeating Count Berenguer Ramon II and besieging Valencia from 1092 until it fell in May 1094. He ruled it with Muslim residents keeping property and faith, and died there in July 1099.

• In 1079, collecting tribute in Seville, he routed a Granadan army and briefly held García Ordóñez prisoner.
• He had military manuals by writers such as Frontinus read aloud in camp and used night raids, drums and feigned retreats.
• His son Diego died fighting the Almoravids in 1097, and his daughter Cristina's line produced a king of Navarre.
• His wife Jimena held Valencia for a few years before retreating to Burgos with his body.
• Legend says his corpse was strapped onto his horse Babieca to scatter the Almoravids, a story the Cantar de mio Cid helped turn into a crusader myth.

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When Alexander III died in 1286 and his heir Margaret died in 1290, 13 claimants competed for the Scottish crown, and the leading nobles, who held estates on both sides of the border, invited Edward I of England to arbitrate. Edward made them accept him as Lord Paramount, chose John Balliol, then invaded in 1296 after the Scots allied with France, sacking Berwick and stripping the king's arms from his tunic. Into that vacuum stepped William Wallace, a lesser noble. A seal on his 1297 letter to Lübeck names his father as Alan Wallace and bears an archer, and his surname likely meant foreigner or Welshman. In May 1297 he killed William de Heselrig, the English sheriff of Lanark.

At Stirling Bridge in September 1297, Wallace and Andrew Moray waited until about half the Earl of Surrey's army had crossed the narrow bridge over the Forth, then cut off the vanguard with schiltrons of spearmen until the bridge collapsed. Made Guardian of Scotland and knighted, he raided northern England, but in July 1298 Edward came north with about 26,000 foot soldiers and broke the schiltrons at Falkirk with Welsh longbowmen and cavalry. Wallace resigned, sought help abroad, and was captured near Glasgow in August 1305 by John de Menteith.

• The Lanercost Chronicle says Wallace made a sword belt from a strip of the treasurer Hugh de Cressingham's skin.
• Later writers such as Blind Harry and Walter Bower turned him into a giant, while historians suspect he learned his trade in Edward's Welsh campaigns.
• A late 1300 letter from Philip IV of France instructed envoys in Rome to assist Wallace.
• At Westminster Hall he argued he could not be a traitor to a king he never swore allegiance to, and was also charged with atrocities against civilians, an early war crimes case.
• Executed at Smithfield, his head was tarred and spiked on London Bridge and his limbs sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.

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The shinobi of the Sengoku period wore dark indigo or brown farm clothes, not black, and spying and arson mattered more to them than assassination. Their name, shinobi no mono, meaning one who steals away, appears as early as the 8th century poetry collection the Man'yōshū, and regional slang called them kusa, grass, or nokizaru, macaque on the roof. They came from the remote mountain districts of Iga and Kōka, where peasant warriors formed defense leagues and, by the 15th century, a guild run by jōnin who negotiated contracts, chūnin who managed logistics and genin who carried out the missions. In 1558 a team of 48 shinobi copied a captured lantern bearing the defenders' crest, walked through the gates of Sawayama Castle and burned it from inside.

Oda Nobunaga invaded Iga in 1581 and broke the guilds. The Edo period story that Hattori Hanzō led 300 Iga and Kōka shinobi to escort Tokugawa Ieyasu home in 1582 is challenged by historian Tatsuo Fujita, who finds his generals bribed their way through, and he ties the legend to Tokugawa Yoshimune recruiting their descendants into his Oniwaban. With peace, former shinobi became guards, fireworks makers, apothecaries or outlaws, and Kabuki playwrights dressed stage assassins as the black clad kuroko stagehands audiences were trained to ignore.

• In 1561 at a fortress in Maibara, hired Iga operatives threatened to quit rather than follow a conventional battle schedule.
• Nightingale floors at Nijō Castle used iron clamps rubbing on nails so any footstep chirped.
• At the 1637 to 1638 siege of Hara Castle, Kōka shinobi measured moat depths and stole the rebels' food and passwords.
• Excavations at the site of the 1590 siege of Odawara found rough throwing stones and clay caltrops.
• A 1748 manuscript found in a Kōka shrine storehouse in 2022 pairs cotton padded sandals with charred owl and turtle powder for hiding.

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In November 2023 a member of the Ukrainian security service hit a target 3,800 meters away, more than two miles, breaking a Canadian special forces record of 3,540 meters. The word sniper goes back to British soldiers in 1770s India who earned the title by shooting the snipe, a camouflaged bird that flies in an erratic zigzag. Modern long range shooting is a team calculation: the spotter reads heat mirage and wind downrange, corrects for slant range when firing up or down a slope, accounts for air density, and at extreme range even for the Coriolis effect, since a bullet can fly 10 to 12 seconds while the Earth turns beneath it. The shooter lies prone, controls breathing and squeezes the trigger between heartbeats.

The craft grew with the technology. German and Swiss shooting clubs of the 15th century prized accuracy, but smoothbore muskets relied on volume of fire until Sir Joseph Whitworth's hexagonal barrel and bullet reached 2,000 yards in 1857 trials, and the Confederacy bought his rifles. In the Second Boer War the British Lovat Scouts, Highland woodsmen, became the first unit known to wear the ghillie suit. Germany's optics dominated early World War I, and the Soviet Union trained more than 400,000 marksmen before and during World War II.

• Misjudging range by 100 meters with a 7.62 mm NATO round drops the bullet about 8 inches low.
• Major Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard's school used papier mâché dummy heads, some smoking cigarettes through rubber tubing, then pushed a rod through the bullet holes to locate German snipers.
• Lyudmila Pavlichenko recorded 309 confirmed kills, and Vasily Zaitsev turned the ruins of Stalingrad into a sniper's terrain.
• Snipers time shots to thunder, jets or artillery to mask the report.
• The US Red Owl system compares a bullet's shockwave with the muzzle blast to point a laser back at the shooter.

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In 711 a mostly Berber and Arab army under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into a Visigothic kingdom weakened by civil war, and King Roderick drowned retreating from the Battle of Guadalete. Within a few years Umayyad rule covered almost the whole peninsula. Spanish tradition marks Pelagius's victory at Covadonga in 722 as the start of an 800 year crusade to win it back, but the rulers of Córdoba barely noticed it, and the records of the 8th to 10th centuries say almost nothing about any plan of reconquest. When the Caliphate of Córdoba broke into rival taifas in the early 11th century, the northern Christian kings chose extortion over conquest, collecting gold through the parias tribute system and hiring out their armies against rival Muslim states.

The mood hardened in the 11th and 12th centuries. Popes granted crusading indulgences for Iberian campaigns and named Ferdinand III of Castile Athleta Christi, while the fall of Toledo in 1085 led taifa rulers to call in the Almoravids and later the Almohads, who ended the old tolerance. After Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada in 1492, about 200,000 Jews were expelled and Muslims were forced to convert. The word Reconquista itself was popularized in the 19th century to build Castilian Catholic nationalism, and Franco later cast his uprising as a new crusade.

• Íñigo Arista, founder of what became the Kingdom of Navarre, intermarried and fought alongside the Muslim Banu Qasi dynasty.
• Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid, spent years in the pay of the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza, defending it against Aragon and the Count of Barcelona.
• Scholars of three faiths in Toledo translated Greek texts from Arabic into Latin.
• Between 1492 and 1610 around three million Muslims and Morisco descendants emigrated or were driven out of Spain.
• A 2016 study found that regions conquered quickly, then handed out as latifundia, still show more inequality today than regions settled slowly by smallholders.

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The geobukseon, or turtle ship, first appears in the annals of the Joseon dynasty in 1413 and 1415, in a mock battle against a Japanese warship, before peace let the costly design lapse. Admiral Yi Sun-sin revived and redesigned it against Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasions of 1592 to 1598, starting at the Battle of Sacheon. Oars and sails freed it from the wind, raised bulwarks gave room for gun ports and vents for black powder smoke, and a dragon head at the bow could pour out sulfurous smoke. Its cheonja, jija, hyeonja and hwangja cannons reached up to about 1,200 meters, and Japanese commanders at Angolpo on July 9, 1592 described close-range barrages at 18 to 30 feet.

An interlocking red pine hull flexed under recoil, and an iron-spiked roof defeated Japanese boarding tactics. No Korean source from the 1590s calls the ship ironclad, though one Japanese chronicle from August 1592 describes ships covered in iron, and Stephen Turnbull notes Japan ordered iron plating for its own ships in February 1593. Samuel Hawley traces the full ironclad label to Western writers in the 1880s, and later Korean attempts to build iron-covered turtle ships failed, one sinking under its own weight.

• Won Kyun, not Yi, commanded when the Joseon navy was crushed at Chilcheollyang.
• Historians doubt the tale of spikes hidden under rice mats, since dry straw would have burned under fire arrows.
• A turtle ship improvised against the General Sherman with metal sheeting and cowhide could not damage its hull.
• Full-scale replicas used in The Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin are moored at Yeosu and Tongyeong.
• The turtle ship appears on South Korea's five won coin.

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Alexander Yaroslavich, son of Grand Prince Yaroslav, served the merchant Republic of Novgorod as a hired prince whose position depended on its assembly, the veche. In July 1240 he caught a Swedish force by surprise where the Izhora meets the Neva, a fight over the Karelian fur trade and access to the Gulf of Finland, and the victory later earned him the name Nevsky in the 15th century. The Livonian Order and the Bishopric of Dorpat then took Pskov and Votian lands. Alexander retook them in 1241 and hanged Votian collaborators.

On April 5, 1242, at Lake Peipus, about 2,600 crusaders, including roughly 800 Danish and German knights and 1,000 Estonian infantry, charged in a wedge into Alexander's 5,000, mostly Novgorod militia. After two hours of slogging on slippery ice his cavalry wings enveloped them and they fled. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle says the dead fell on the grass. The drowning knights were invented for Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, made as Stalin braced for war with Germany.

• The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Alexander in 1547, the year Ivan the Terrible was crowned tsar.
• Eisenstein dressed the Teutonic Knights in helmets resembling the German Stahlhelm.
• Alexander's brother Andrei's troops fought alongside his druzhina on the ice.
• The Soviet Union created the Order of Alexander Nevsky in 1942, 700 years after the battle.
• The battle's anniversary remains one of Russia's days of military honor.

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Belisarius, born around 500 in what is now Bulgaria, rose in Justinian's guard and built the bucellarii, a personal regiment of up to 7,000 armored horsemen carrying both lance and bow. At Dara in 530 he dug angled trenches to funnel Persian cavalry into killing zones, but at Callinicum in 531 his overconfident troops forced a battle and he fled. In 532 he and Mundus sealed the exits of the Hippodrome during the Nika riots and killed between 30,000 and 60,000 people, binding him to Justinian. In 533 he crossed to Africa with 500 ships, punished looters to keep the locals friendly, and broke the Vandal king Gelimer at Ad Decimum.

Sent to Italy in 535 with about 8,000 men, he took Naples through an abandoned aqueduct and held Rome against Vitiges by sallying out with horse archers. At Ravenna in 540 he pretended to accept the Goths' offer of the Western crown, then took the city for Justinian, who recalled him in distrust. He bluffed Khosrow with 6,000 hand-picked men in hunting gear, persuaded Totila by letter to spare Rome, and in 559 beat 7,000 Kutrigur Bulgars with 300 veterans and shouting civilians. He was pardoned of conspiracy in 562 and died in 565.

• At Ad Decimum, Gelimer halted his army to bury his brother, handing Belisarius the moment to strike.
• On Theodora's orders, Antonina accused Pope Silverius of treason, and he was exiled and starved.
• A divided command with Narses contributed to the loss of Milan, where the Goths killed the male population.
• Procopius's Secret History accuses Antonina of an affair with their adopted son Theodosius.
• The famous image of Belisarius as a blind beggar at the gates of Rome is a fabrication.